The most catastrophic Masters Sunday meltdown never aired on TV

AUGUSTA, Ga. — When someone witnesses a catastrophe, several interesting things happen in the brain in an instant.

The autonomic nervous system floods the body with adrenaline and cortisol, speeding up sensory processing in the amygdala and supercharging memory encoding — basically turning the brain into a vector for documentation. Occasionally, this physiological response causes a phenomenon called “tonic immobility,” where the witness of a traumatic event does not flee or fight, but freezes.

In this situation, the witness is helpless — trapped in a moment of unforgivable horror, incapable of doing anything to alter the situation, and undergoing a moment of physiological stress in which their brain is uniquely attenuated to remember every gory detail.

This is the unfortunate situation that befell a few hundred patrons on the side of the 13th hole on Sunday afternoon at the Masters, when Haotong Li endured the worst 30 minutes of his golfing life, then recorded a score that both torpedoed his tournament and defied belief: A quintuple-bogey 10.

The trauma began fairly innocuously. On his second shot from the fairway, Li overcooked his 3-wood approach into the winding section of Rae’s Creek that frames the hole. Under normal circumstances, the situation facing him would be fairly simple: Recover the ball from the creek, take a drop on dry land no nearer to the hole, and play the wedge approach shot into the green.

Except, as fate would have it, Li’s approach did not arrive under normal circumstances. Rather than settling inside the tributary, his ball ricocheted off a large rock and took an ugly bounce left, nestling deep into the bushes further up the hill on the far side of the creek.

Li sauntered down the fairway without too much concern — but realized his bad luck as soon as he arrived at the scene of the crime. Li’s caddie, Jady de Beer, drew the short straw, dropping the bag and stumbling across Rae’s Creek as he entered the bushes in pursuit of the ball.

After a few hapless seconds, the patrons on the far side of the fairway took pity on the caddie and began to shout instructions en masse, directing de Beer toward the golf ball, which he eventually recovered (Left, left! Up! Higher!). After a long conversation, Li grabbed a wedge and headed across the river to survey the lie in the trees.

This might have seemed like a good idea to both parties at the time of the decision, but it seemed quite clear to everybody on the opposite side of the fairway that it was an unforgivable error because it introduced a powerful, terrifying force: temptation. The ball was almost assuredly unplayable, and Li seemed like he’d be better served to return to his previous spot than take on any additional risk. But after some more chatter, Li ignored the gallery’s better judgment and settled in for his chip from the middle of the hedges by straddling a bush and battling a thicket of branches just to get his club on the ground.

Finally, he swung, and the crowd’s worst fears were realized. The ball traveled less than 15 feet, on an angle roughly perpendicular to the direction he’d intended to hit his ball, and settled even further into the crap.

It was around this time that my colleague, Dylan Dethier, and I realized we might be on the brink of witnessing something not just bad, but truly horrific. Li’s ball had been in hell. Now it was somewhere worse. He no longer had the option to return to the site of his original tee shot. Instead he could take several club lengths and get a drop that way.

Li appeared to realize this himself as his mind finally adjusted and he recovered the ball in the bushes. He spent a little while attempting to settle into a stance in this new, worse lie — at one point taking dead-aim at the group of onlookers — before giving a dejected look at his ball and stepping away.

At long last, and to the great relief of those seated potentially within low-laser-to-the-shins range, he decided to take a drop, which was when a new character entered our story for the first time: The rules official, who’d been serving as innocent bystander up to this point.

The problem was that Li appeared to pick his ball up off the ground, like a kid might pluck a dandelion, but he was not actually in a penalty area. The red lines demarcating said area were behind him; he’d just picked his ball up from live action, or at least that’s how it appeared from our vantage point, and so the rules official reacted like Li had just cut the wrong wire on a pipe bomb, furiously waving the golfer back into place so that he could take a proper drop from the location in deeper-hell. Put another way: You’re not allowed to do that.

Eventually, the rules official and Li worked out a solution — though the official still seemed impressively anxious about the whole affair — and after a few more long walks zig-zagging Rae’s creek, Li had taken a proper unplayable drop, sourced a proper golf club, and was prepared to play a shot advancing his ball up in the general direction of the green. (An aside: At one point during the zig-zagging, de Beer realized he’d left the bag in the fairway behind Li’s first bush shot, roughly 30 yards away, and began running back to gather it at pretty close to full speed. Two thoughts on that decision: 1. There is no running at Augusta National. 2. It’d been around 15 minutes since he’d first entered the creek when he started the sprint, which struck me as an unusual time to begin caring about pace of play.)

Li played his pitch shot and found safety at last, though he surprisingly used a full swing. He sent his ball high over the trees and long and left of the green, landing mercifully in an area where could safely use his putter. The crowd, which was at this point equal parts dismayed and totally stunned, responded with an Augusta National first: A Bronx cheer for the golfer, who quickly escaped from the wrong side of Rae’s Creek and up in the direction of the green.

It was only now, pretty close to 25 full minutes after Li had first entered the wilderness, that the crowd’s attention turned to the other golfer sharing the hole with him: World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler, who was preparing to hit what might be described as the single most consequential shot of his entire Masters week, a pitch shot to set up a must-make birdie to cut the deficit from leader Rory McIlroy to 2.

Say what you will about Scheffler’s recent snippiness with the press and himself, the man handled the first act of Li’s disaster with the patience of a saint. He’d paced back and forth on the fairway, up to the green, back behind his ball, and now he hustled up to the ball and hit a good — if not great — pitch to roughly 11 feet.

Scheffler might have reasonably expected that his birdie putt might arrive soon after that pitch shot. Common sense would dictate Li playing his next shot with some eagerness, considering the delay his misfortune had already caused. Justin Rose was waiting in the fairway by now, after all, and nearly the entire 14th hole was unoccupied ahead. But Li hadn’t demonstrated much urgency at any point throughout the process and wasn’t about to start now.

Li certainly may have hoped this part would wrap up fast. Instead he made a short, aggressive stroke with his putter toward the tucked Sunday pin location and it became clear that his disaster was only beginning. Li watched in a state of mesmerized disbelief as his ball rolled past the hole, past his flagstick-tending caddie, past the edge of the green and all the way into the water.

It was around this time that the crowd reacted as if it had literally seen a collision, letting out the kind of low, horrified, disbelieving grunt one might hear after metal on metal, or discovering a cockroach infestation.

It’s unclear what Scheffler was thinking around this time, but his inner-dialogue probably didn’t get any more forgiving after Li’s eighth shot — which was another putt from the same location as the first putt into the water, though it traveled only about half the distance to the hole — nor his ninth, which missed the hole on the low side. Somehow Scheffler’s playing partner had managed to take eight shots between Scheffler’s second on the 13th and his birdie try, which also missed on the low side.

Thankfully, by the time the ball got within striking distance of the hole on his ninth stroke, Li was no longer trying to maintain the artifice of patience. He practically ran to place his mark behind his ball, clearing the runway for Scheffler. And then practically ran up to hit his tap-in, which fell into the hole for a truly breathtaking quintuple-bogey 10 … and elicited a second Bronx cheer from the Amen Corner faithful.

Li, to his credit, was a good sport about the debacle, holding his hands to the sky in mock-celebration after finally escaping with a 10. And CBS, to its credit, was a good sport about it too, choosing not to show Li’s fall from four under and in-the-thick-of-it to one over and deeply disturbed.

But to those who watched the action from up close, the journey was a horrifying exercise in the kind of trauma only Augusta National can inflict.

The pain of the moment was real for Haotong Li, but the memory was even more painful for those who saw it up close, and who will now live their lives trying to forget it.

“I always thought I wanted to play this hole,” one of the victims said Sunday afternoon. “Now I’m not so sure.”

You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.